Summary of the impact

Open Data has lowered barriers to data access, increased government transparency and delivered significant economic, social and environmental benefits. Southampton research and leadership has led to the UK Public Data Principles, which were enshrined in the UK Government Open Data White Paper, and has led to data.gov.uk, which provides access to 10,000 government datasets. The open datasets are proving means for strong citizen engagement and are delivering economic benefit through the £10 million Open Data Institute. These in turn have placed the UK at the forefront of the global data revolution: the UK experience has informed open data initiatives in the USA, EU and G8.

Summary of the impact

Founded in York in 1996, the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) has transformed how archaeological research is communicated in the UK, and impacted digital archiving throughout the world. Without the ADS, much of the fragile digital data (often the primary record of sites now destroyed) would have been lost. Instead, they are freely available to all. This impact extends across national heritage agencies, local government, commercial archaeology, and the public. Our resources are widely used with over two million page requests per month; almost half from beyond the HE sector. A recent study has concluded that the ADS is worth £5m per annum to the UK economy (Beagrie & Houghton 2013). The ADS has helped shape the digital preservation policy of English Heritage and informed practice in the United States, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany.

Summary of the impact

The research improves digital data archives by embedding computation into the storage controllers that maintain the integrity of the data within the archive. This opens up a number of possibilities:

• Data analysis can be automated and incorporated into the archiving process;
• The approach improves the archiving of all types of digital objects, from television broadcasts to genomes;
• The approach can be applied to distributed data and to datasets that are too big for traditional approaches.

This has impact on three different classes of beneficiary:

• Providers of national data infrastructure in the UK and US, who are incorporating Cheshire 3 into national data repositories;
• Data Users, such as Astra Zeneca, RAI, Sanger Institute, who are using Cheshire 3 to extract valuable information from their data;
• Equipment vendors, such as NetApp, Xerox and Bellerophon Mobile, who are developing commercial systems that will use Cheshire 3.

Summary of the impact

Within this case study we present the TrOWL technology developed at the University of Aberdeen that enables more efficient and scalable exploitation of semantic data. TrOWL and its component algorithms — REL, Quill and the Aberdeen Profile Checker — have had non-academic impact in two key areas. With respect to practitioners and professional services, the technology has enabled the introduction of two important World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards: OWL2 and SPARQL 1.1. This has led to impact in the way that many companies work, across a range of sectors. Further, through partnership with specific companies, the use of TrOWL has changed the way they operate and the technical solutions they provide to clients. These collaborations have led to economic impacts in companies such as Oracle in "mitigat[ing] the losses of potential customers", and IBM in "using the TrOWL reasoning infrastructure in [their] Smarter Cities solutions".

Summary of the impact

Targeted Projection Pursuit (TPP) — developed at Northumbria University — is a novel method for interactive exploration of high-dimension data sets without loss of information. The TPP method performs better than current dimension-reduction methods since it finds projections that best approximate a target view enhanced by certain prior knowledge about the data. "Valley Care" provides a Telecare service to over 5,000 customers as part of Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, and delivers a core service for vulnerable and elderly people (receiving an estimated 129,000 calls per annum) that allows them to live independently and remain in their homes longer. The service informs a wider UK ageing community as part of the NHS Foundation Trust.

Applying our research enabled the managers of Valley Care to establish the volume, type and frequency of calls, identify users at high risk, and to inform the manufacturers of the equipment how to update the database software. This enabled Valley Care managers and staff to analyse the information quickly in order to plan efficiently the work of call operators and social care workers. Our study also provided knowledge about usage patterns of the technology and valuably identified clients at high risk of falls. This is the first time that mathematical and statistical analysis of data sets of this type has been done in the UK and Europe.

As a result of applying the TPP method to its Call Centre multivariate data, Valley Care has been able to transform the quality and efficiency of its service, while operating within the same budget.

Summary of the impact

KCL research played an essential role in the development of data provenance standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body for web technologies, which is responsible for HTTP, HTML, etc. The provenance of data concerns records of the processes by which data was produced, by whom, from what other data, and similar metadata. The standards directly impact on practitioners and professional services through adoption by commercial, governmental and other bodies, such as Oracle, IBM, and Nasa, in handling computational records of the provenance of data.

Summary of the impact

The research in this case study has pioneered knowledge management technology. It has had major impact on drug discovery and translational medicine and is widely adopted in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. The impacts are:

1. The formation of InforSense to commercialise the technology. The company had 150 employees in June 2009 when it merged with IDBS Ltd to create the world's second largest life science informatics company.
2. The results from knowledge management technology and associated software platform have enabled the integration of molecular, imaging, clinical data and analytics, to identify biomarkers for disease identification, treatment selection and side effect prediction.
3. Since 2002 the technology has been deployed by major pharmaceutical companies (including GSK, AZ, Roche, Pfizer, Bayer and Boehringer Ingelheim) and leading healthcare institutions e.g. Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School and King's Health Partners, generating significant social, health and economic impact.

Summary of the impact

Researchers in Cambridge have developed a data standard for storing and exchanging data between different programs in the field of macromolecular NMR spectroscopy. The standard has been used as the foundation for the development of an open source software suite for NMR data analysis, leading to improved research tools which have been widely adopted by both industrial and academic research groups, who benefit from faster drug development times and lower development costs. The CCPN data standard is an integral part of major European collaborative efforts for NMR software integration, and is being used by the major public databases for protein structures and NMR data, namely Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) and BioMagResBank.

Summary of the impact

Research carried out at Birkbeck's Department of Computer Science and Information Systems since 2000 has produced techniques for the management and integration of complex, heterogeneous life sciences data not previously possible with large-scale life sciences data repositories. The research has involved members of the department and researchers from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and University College London (UCL) and has led to the creation of several resources providing information about genes and proteins. These resources include the BioMap data warehouse, which integrated the CATH database — holding a classification of proteins into families according to their structure, the Gene3D database — holding information about protein sequences, and other related information on protein families, structures and the functions of proteins such as enzymes. These resources are heavily utilised by companies worldwide to explore relationships between protein structure and protein function and to aid in drug design.

Summary of the impact

State-of-the-art reasoning systems developed in the UoA have underpinned the standardisation of ontology languages, and play a critical role in numerous applications. For example, HermiT, software developed in the UoA, is being used by Électricité de France (EDF) to provide bespoke energy saving advice to 265,000 customers in France, and a roll out of the use of the system to all of their 17 million customers is planned.